Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Memory

Memory

Lasky, Dorothea

Paperback

Series: Semiotext(e) / Native Agents

Biographies GeneralLiterary CriticismPoetry Criticism

Publisher Price: $17.95

ISBN10: 1635902592
ISBN13: 9781635902594
Publisher: Semiotext(e)
Published: Nov 4 2025
Pages: 264
Weight: 0.70
Height: 0.90 Width: 5.40 Depth: 7.90
Language: English
A poet's spacious exploration of time, memory, and art, in homage to Bernadette Mayer.

A spiritual homage to Bernadette Mayer's monumental artwork of the same title, Dorothea Lasky's Memory is a cycle of poet's essays stirred by two profound questions. What constitutes personhood and consciousness? What memories get lost, and why?

Expansive in her quest for answers, Lasky launches an inspired investigation of the forces that form our lives and deepest senses of ourselves. She identifies three dimensions of memory--ancestral, personal, and poetic--and in her singularly clear voice, undertakes to enter into their mysteries. From those recesses, she returns with a wide-ranging collection of essays that like lyric poems find the universal inside the particular. Memory reflects on the banal; private emotions and historical trauma; dear departed poets (Diane di Prima, Lucie Brock-Broido); her father's battle with Alzheimer's; and cultural events that have become charged sites of collective reminiscence (the moon landing, the music of Neutral Milk Hotel). Other pieces face the flip side of memory, asking what's left where memory is absent, and what's real beyond the horizon of death. The book closes with Time, the Rose, and the Moon, an ars poetica published here in English for the first time, which offers the ancient symbol of the Ouroboros as a figure for the nonlinear processes of time, memory, and art.

Like Mayer before her, Lasky reveals memory to be huge and haunting, as she accumulates impressions that challenge the very possibility of fixed meaning. Every rose has the scent of death, she writes. And poetry is a perfume. That will stay on your body forever.... Whatever happens this time around, remember that.

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